Penny Dreadful

Eva Green as Vanessa Ives on Penny Dreadful

I have a soft spot for the first season of Penny Dreadful. Perhaps it is because I am enamored with watching Eva Green chewing up a gothic stage. Perhaps it is because I do love some gory, cheesy, snobbish-joke-laced Dorian Gray slashfic.

Whatever the case, that soft spot did not extend to its second season, and I have a hard time believing I sat through it in its entirety solely to hear them say the name Lawrence Talbot.

What to say about it? On the one hand, there's nothing quite like it being produced. On the other, when in doubt, it always takes Hannibal's style-over-substance road. It is a worthier descendant of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen than that abortion of a movie, but that's hardly a tall ottoman to step over.

The disjointed band of merry adventurers that it took Showtime about seven and a half hours to finally get together for the first season are back. I was expecting that the past was prologue, and we would now finally see them all acting in conjunction with some solid story.

We didn't.

Dorian Gray is still wasted. It feels he's there because the writers felt an obligation to include him, given the period, but have no idea what to do with him other than use him as the series' excuse for varied sex scenes. This season's finale shows they at long last sort of have an idea of where to go with him... but for that, you'll need to have the time and patience to sit through another one. They do, eventually, show you his picture. They shouldn't have. They should have kept Lovecraft's counsel and kept the unspeakable, the indescribable, hidden.

Its disjointed quality gives you too much time to wonder about its issues. For instance, the fact that other than Ms. Ives, it's got a monomaniacal obsession against female characters (and one could argue Miss Ives is a victim as well, even if her broad strokes are painted with an equally coarse but more charitable brush). Or how it forgets, from scene to scene, what just happened (how did Chandler exit the mansion without being seen by the myriad of Scotland Yard agents?). Or how there is little – if any – anticipation. If you show us a gun, have the decency of firing it a couple episodes later, will you? Doing it a handful of minutes after you pulled it out is worse than predictable – it's crass.

What to salvage from it? Obliquely, and if you squint, you could see in this season the morale of showing why the Catholic dogma of resisting Satan's temptations but obeying God is inherently broken. As long as you desire something, you can always be tempted – unless what you desire is being free. That's the only thing neither side can truly offer you, because in exchange for their offerings they mean to tie you down.

And that is me seeing shapes in clouds to justify the time I spent with it.

Penny Dreadful's enunciation is impeccable, but it only quotes banalities while trying to pass as literate.

(Published originally on my old blog)

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